Facts about Austria
Capital Vienna · Europe
10 topics · about 20 minutes
Austria is a landlocked Alpine republic that spent six centuries at the center of the Habsburg monarchy, an empire that governed much of central Europe until 1918. What remains is a small, wealthy federal state of about nine million people whose cultural output, particularly in music, still carries far beyond its borders.
Nine federal states divide a country that is roughly 62 percent Alpine, so the mountains set the terms almost everywhere. The high ranges fill the west and south, running from Vorarlberg through Tyrol and Salzburg toward Carinthia, and the Grossglockner reaches 3,798 meters inside the largest national park in the Alps. The flatter, more populous east is drained by the Danube, which crosses the country from the German border to Slovakia, and the far east opens into the Pannonian plain around the shallow Neusiedler See.
Vienna holds about a fifth of the national population and was the imperial capital, which is why a city of two million carries palaces, museums and concert halls sized for a far larger state. Graz is the second city and a university town, Linz sits on the Danube as an industrial center, Innsbruck is wedged into the Inn valley among the Tyrolean peaks, and Salzburg trades on Mozart and its baroque old town. Visitors divide fairly cleanly between the winter ski season in the western valleys and a summer circuit of Vienna, Salzburg and the Salzkammergut lakes.
- Population
- 9.2 million
- Area
- 83,879 km²
- Currency
- Euro (€)
- Official language
- German
- States
- 9
- Highest point
- Grossglockner, 3,798 m
The Austria course
Geography of Austria
Landlocked and 62 percent Alpine, with the Danube crossing the flatter, busier east.
History of Austria
Six centuries of Habsburg rule, an empire lost in 1918, and neutrality written into the constitution in 1955.
Language of Austria
German with its own official vocabulary, and a January that Austrians call something else entirely.
Culture of Austria
Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Strauss, plus Freud, and a coffee house tradition with UNESCO listing.
Economy of Austria
Tourism in two seasons, specialised industry, and a bargaining model that keeps strikes rare.
Politics of Austria
A federal republic of nine states, neutral by constitution, hosting more international bodies than its size suggests.
Nature & Wildlife of Austria
The largest national park in the Alps, with ibex and bearded vultures brought back into it.
Food & Cuisine of Austria
Wiener schnitzel, an emperor’s shredded pancake, and a chocolate cake that caused a seven-year lawsuit.
Landmarks of Austria
A palace with 1,441 rooms, a lakeside village overwhelmed by its own photographs, and an Alpine road.
People & Society of Austria
Nine million people, a fifth of them in Vienna, and a capital that keeps winning liveability surveys.
Geography of Austria
Austria is landlocked and borders eight countries, more than most states its size. Roughly 62 percent of the territory is Alpine, and the ranges rise westward, so Vorarlberg and Tyrol are almost entirely mountain while the east flattens into the Vienna basin and the Pannonian plain. The Grossglockner, at 3,798 meters, is the highest point and stands inside Hohe Tauern, the largest national park in the Alps.
The Danube crosses the north of the country and its valley carries most of the population, industry and farmland along with the terraced vineyards of the Wachau. Austria holds hundreds of Alpine lakes, the Salzkammergut cluster east of Salzburg among the best known, and the shallow Neusiedler See on the Hungarian border is a steppe lake that has occasionally dried out altogether.
History of Austria
The Habsburgs took the Austrian lands in 1278 and held them until 1918, assembling through marriage and inheritance an empire that at various points reached Spain, the Low Countries, Hungary, Bohemia and much of Italy. Vienna withstood Ottoman sieges in 1529 and 1683, the second of which marked the limit of Ottoman expansion into Europe.
The monarchy became Austria-Hungary in 1867 and collapsed at the end of the First World War, leaving a small German-speaking republic that struggled to see itself as viable. Germany annexed it in the Anschluss of 1938, and after 1945 the country was occupied by the four Allied powers until the State Treaty of 1955 restored full sovereignty on condition of permanent neutrality. Austria joined the European Union in 1995.
Language of Austria
German is the official language, but Austrian Standard German is a recognized national variety with its own dictionary and its own official terms, particularly for food and administration. Austrians write Jänner rather than Januar for January and order Erdäpfel rather than Kartoffeln for potatoes, and around two dozen such words were formally protected when the country joined the European Union.
Spoken Austrian dialects belong to the Bavarian group and can be hard going for Germans from the north, while Vorarlberg in the far west speaks an Alemannic dialect closer to Swiss German than to Viennese. Slovene, Croatian and Hungarian hold official status in particular districts of Carinthia and Burgenland, a legacy of the empire’s internal borders.
Culture of Austria
For a country of nine million, the musical record is disproportionate: Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the Strauss family all worked here, and Beethoven spent his career in Vienna. The Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert is broadcast to tens of millions of viewers, and the Salzburg Festival has run since 1920.
Vienna around 1900 also produced psychoanalysis under Sigmund Freud, the Secession painters including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. Viennese coffee house culture, where a single cup buys the right to sit for hours with the newspapers, carries UNESCO intangible heritage status.
Economy of Austria
Austria is a high-income economy built on specialised manufacturing, machinery and metals through firms such as voestalpine, alongside tourism that runs in two distinct seasons and contributes a larger share of output than in most European countries. Red Bull, founded in 1984, became the most globally visible Austrian brand.
Wage bargaining runs through Sozialpartnerschaft, an institutionalised negotiation between employer and employee organizations that has kept industrial disputes unusually rare since 1945. Germany is by far the dominant trading partner, and hydropower from Alpine rivers supplies a large share of electricity.
Politics of Austria
Austria is a federal parliamentary republic. The president is directly elected and holds formal powers that are mostly exercised on the government’s advice, while the chancellor leads the cabinet and answers to the National Council, the directly elected chamber of parliament. The Federal Council represents the nine states.
Permanent neutrality has been a constitutional principle since the 1955 State Treaty, so Austria belongs to the European Union but not to NATO. Vienna hosts an unusual concentration of international institutions for a city its size, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, OPEC and one of the four major United Nations office sites.
Nature & Wildlife of Austria
Almost half of Austria is forested, and Hohe Tauern, established in stages from 1981, is the largest national park in the Alps at over 1,800 square kilometers. Alpine ibex were hunted out and later reintroduced, and bearded vultures were released back into the range from 1986 after roughly a century of absence.
Marmots, chamois and golden eagles are the characteristic high-altitude species, while the Danube floodplain east of Vienna is protected as a rare stretch of unregulated river landscape. Neusiedler See on the Hungarian border, a shallow steppe lake fringed with reed beds, is a major bird site and carries World Heritage listing jointly with Hungary.
Food & Cuisine of Austria
Austrian cooking absorbed the whole empire, so Hungarian goulash, Bohemian dumplings and Italian influences all sit inside what is treated as national food. Wiener schnitzel, veal beaten thin and fried in breadcrumbs, is the emblematic dish and must legally be veal when sold under that name.
Pastry is where the country is strongest, from apple strudel to the Sachertorte, whose recipe produced a seven-year legal battle between the Hotel Sacher and the Demel bakery over which could call theirs the original. Kaiserschmarrn, a shredded pancake served with fruit compote, is the Alpine standby, and Austrian white wine from Grüner Veltliner has a serious international following.
Landmarks of Austria
Schönbrunn in Vienna was the Habsburg summer residence and holds 1,441 rooms behind a baroque facade, with formal gardens and the oldest zoo in the world, founded in 1752. The Hofburg in the city center served as the winter palace and now houses the president’s offices along with the imperial treasury.
Salzburg’s old town sits beneath the Hohensalzburg fortress and trades heavily on Mozart’s birthplace. Hallstatt, a village of a few hundred people wedged between a lake and a cliff, receives so many day visitors that the community has put up barriers to discourage photography, and the Grossglockner High Alpine Road climbs past 2,500 meters in a series of switchbacks.
People & Society of Austria
Austria has about 9.2 million residents, and roughly a fifth live in Vienna, which makes the capital dominant in a way no other Austrian city approaches. Fertility sits well below replacement level, so growth depends on migration.
Around a quarter of residents were born abroad or hold foreign citizenship, with the largest communities tracing to Germany, Turkey, Serbia and, more recently, Ukraine and Syria. Vienna has topped or come near the top of international liveability rankings for years, helped by an unusual social housing system in which the city owns or controls a large share of the rental stock.
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